The Republican Party’s greatest flaw is that it does not have an expansive, inclusive platform based on the idea that we need to improve things for all people.

Their platform is formed around the idea that the system should be systemically rigged to keep the Wealthy, Whites, and Wall Street in power.

It’s a party built on racism and the idea that poor of all colors are undeserving of equal opportunities.

Today’s Republican Party is built in part on fear of people who are not white. There’s no other way to say it. The party is committed to reducing voting rights for African-Americans. It has a history of alienating African-Americans that long predates Trump, stretching through Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush and Mitt Romney.

A great suggestion on how police should work with protesters to avoid violence at large events. It should be used on the regular.

We’d like to see better cross group planning at Standing Rock.

[Police] should invite protest organizers to planning sessions to share perspectives, tactics and concerns about how demonstrations will be conducted and policed. One strategy: Team demonstration leaders with police officers, to jointly calm emotions and identify, and help to eject, people bent on violence.

Closing the Standing Rock protest site is a travesty of corporate greed over public will. One might expect this under the Trump regime, but not Obama.

The American people have a right to protest the environmental sanctity of their land. The Army Corp is doing the bidding of their corporate overlords.

Protesters should decide if it’s safe to stay the winter. The protest is about safety. They should decide if their safety at the site is a greater issue than the safety of their drinking water. Safety is a choice people make, not a condition imposed by the government. If the government wants protesters to be safe they shouldn’t turn water cannons on them. Closing the protest area is about ending an embarrassing protest.

Speaking of safety, the people of Flint, Michigan dont have safe drinking water after the local government meddled. Decisions at Standing Rock should be about the long term safety of their water. The Dakota Access Pipeline is the bigger threat here.

Like this:

A pointed and poignant rebuke of Trump. A well written and heartfelt look at why this man is wholly unfit and unqualified to lead our country.

You are an aberration and abomination who is willing to do and say anything — no matter whom it aligns you with and whom it hurts — to satisfy your ambitions.
I don’t believe you care much at all about this country or your party or the American people. I believe that the only thing you care about is self-aggrandizement and self-enrichment.
You are a fraud and a charlatan.
I have not only an ethical and professional duty to call out how obscene your very existence is at the top of American government; I have a moral obligation to do so.
It’s not that I don’t believe that people can change and grow. They can. But real growth comes from the accepting of responsibility and repenting of culpability. Expedient reversal isn’t growth; it’s gross.

Theft of wages by employers is estimated to costs low income workers $50 billion a year. That’s 3x greater than the total of all robberies, burglaries, larcenies, and car thefts in a year.

The central theme of NobodyisFlyingthePlane is that we’re not paying attention to the real things that harm us and the real causes of the problems we face. This is a great example. We spend enormous amounts of time, money, and mental efforts fighting theft by the disenfranchised, but we institutionally support theft from them by those higher up on the ladder.

NobodyisFlyingthePlane means we fail to see our problems for what they really are. The same behavior we enshrine as good business practice we imprison others for.

failure to pay what workers are legally entitled to can be called wage theft; in essence, it involves employers taking money that belongs to their employees and keeping it for themselves. evidence suggests that wage theft is widespread and costs workers billions of dollars a year, a transfer from low-income employees to business owners that worsens income inequality, hurts workers and their families, and damages the sense of fairness and justice that a democracy needs to survive.

All of the robberies, burglaries, larcenies, and motor vehicle thefts in the nation cost their victims less than $14 billion in 2012, according to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports.2That is well over one-third of the estimated cost of wage theft nationwide.

Underscoring how widespread the problem of wage theft is, Kentucky Labor Cabinet spokesperson Daniel Lowry reported that the state collected $4.4 million in restitution on wage theft cases in 2013, while comparatively all robberies in the state totaled $2.5 million.14

Giving people skills that provide good jobs and provide value to the market and society has been a missing key to this massive job shift we’ve experienced.

It’s time to follow Delaware Governor Jack Markell’s example and retool education to look at other outcomes beside college.

In his almost eight years in office, he has made his No. 1 priority lifting the skills of Delaware’s citizens. He worked on traditional education, expanding high-quality pre-K and helping low-income teenagers go to college. And he worked on what academic researchers like Robert Schwartz call “the forgotten half”: the many students who won’t graduate from college but who also need strong skills to find decent jobs. Their struggles are a major reason that America’s work force is no longer considered the world’s most highly skilled.
But having a major can also help students who don’t know what they want to be when they grow up. It connects book learning to real life. It can help launch them into college or a certificate program and avoid the epidemic of academic drift.
Many people in New Castle, not to mention the industrial Midwest, feel a deep cultural connection to craftsmanship — to making things and working with their hands. They’re not inspired by working in cubicles or comfortable offices.
At the same time, they can’t simply do as previous generations did and graduate from high school into a good job. They can’t bring back yesterday’s economy. They need blue-collar skill-building to thrive.
The country has failed to provide nearly enough of that skill-building, and we’re all living with the consequences.